Dave Kilcoyne gears up for derby battle

When you ply your trade in the front-row of the Munster scrum, following legendary figures like Tom Clifford, Phil O’Callaghan, Peter Clohessy, and John Hayes, there’s little confusion over your responsibility to the famous red shirt.

It may not be one of the more glamorous positions on the pitch but rugby teams rarely come out on the right side of the result without a scrum that can at least hold its own. At 28 years of age and with a successful career behind him at Ardscoil Ris (where he won a Schools Junior Cup medal) followed by considerable success with UL Bohemian, Munster, and Ireland, there is no need to beat that message into Dave Kilcoyne.

His most recent challenge came at Musgrave Park last Saturday against Glasgow Warriors with whom Munster’s rivalry is well chronicled. While there was little or no controversy on this occasion, it was a proper battle.

“It was always going to be a hard game,” said Kilcoyne. “Any time you meet and beat a team like Glasgow four times poses a challenge in itself. Now it’s on to Ulster to try and get a home semi-final and after that, Saracens in the semi-final of the Champions Cup.

“That makes for a fantastic buzz around the place but we won’t let that take away from the task at hand of taking on Ulster this weekend. They are on quite a run of form at the moment, undefeated in their last seven games.

“They’re a hungry side, we’re a hungry side, we’re after a home semi, they’re after a top four finish, so I think Saturday is going to be a great game.”

Kilcoyne’s scrummaging has improved enormously over the years while he is now probably even better known for some serious open field carries that have helped to open up many a defence.

At 18 stone 8 lbs (118kgs) and 6ft 1ins tall, he certainly has the physique for the job. He is again looking forward to a serious test against a highly rated Ulster front-row and the kind of performance that will give Joe Schmidt no alternative but to call him up for the summer tour of the US and Japan.

“Irish derbies are normally tough affairs with knock-on implications for everything else, top fours, home semis, Irish selection,” Kilcoyne acknowledged. “We’ll focus more on how we can improve on our scrum against Glasgow even though I thought we scrummaged well and probably shaded it. We’re just looking at where we can improve still further and carry that through Saturday. We look more at the collective rather than individuals and will look at their scrum as a whole and do our analysis that way.

“We had a great win over Ulster up in Ravenhill and often refer back to that game. It is one of the hardest places to get a win. We took real confidence from it and I think it propelled us into the position we are today. We came from 12 points down and were behind at half- time and to go out and dig out the result, yeah, it was definitely a changing point.”

Having the Ulster game to focus the mind before the big one against Saracens is seen as a plus by Kilcoyne.

“There’s no point saying that Saracens isn’t to the forefront of our minds, because it definitely is,” he stated. “We will focus on this week’s game but we’ll definitely be putting things in place to combat Saracens the following week and I don’t think we could get a better challenge before that game than to play a hungry Ulster side in Thomond Park the week before.”